The Holy Trinity in the Life of the Church ()

Editorial Board

Khaled Anatolios

Alkiviadis Calivas

Robert J. Daly, SJ

Paul Gavrilyuk

Jennifer Hevelone-Harper

Edith Humphrey

published under the auspices of

The Stephen and Catherine

PAPPAS PATRISTIC INSTITUTE

of

HOLY CROSS GREEK ORTHODOX SCHOOL OF THEOLOGY

BROOKLINE, MASSACHUSETTS

Previously published in the series

Wealth and Poverty in Early Church and Society

edited by Susan R. Holman

Apocalyptic Thought in Early Christianity

edited by Robert J. Daly, SJ

© 2014 by Holy Cross Greek Orthodox School of Theology

Published by Baker Academic

a division of Baker Publishing Group

P.O. Box 6287, Grand Rapids, MI 49516-6287

www.bakeracademic.com

Ebook edition created 2014

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means—for example, electronic, photocopy, recording—without the prior written permission of the publisher. The only exception is brief quotations in printed reviews.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is on file at the Library of Congress, Washington, DC.

ISBN 978-1-4412-2126-1

Unless noted otherwise, translations of ancient writings are those of the authors.

Scripture quotations labeled KJV are from the King James Version of the Bible.

Scripture quotations labeled NRSV are from the New Revised Standard Version of the Bible, copyright © 1989, by the Division of Christian Education of the National Council of the Churches of Christ in the United States of America. Used by permission. All rights reserved.

Scripture quotations labeled RSV are from the Revised Standard Version of the Bible, copyright 1952 [2nd edition, 1971] by the Division of Christian Education of the National Council of the Churches of Christ in the United States of America. Used by permission. All rights reserved.

Contents

Cover    i

Series Page    ii

Title Page    iii

Copyright Page    iv

Foreword by Father Nick Triantafilou   vii

Preface by Khaled Anatolios   ix

Part 1. The Trinity in Christian Worship

1. The Baptismal Command (Matthew 28:19–20) and the Doctrine of the Trinity   3

Joseph T. Lienhard, SJ

2. Eucharist and Trinity in the Liturgies of the Early Church   15

Robert J. Daly, SJ

3. The Nascent Trinitarian Worship of Martyrdom of Polycarp 14 and Ephesians 1   39

Paul A. Hartog

4. Gregory of Nyssa on Knowing the Trinity   55

Nonna Verna Harrison

Part 2. Jesus Christ, the Trinity, and Christian Salvation

5. The Holy Trinity as the Dynamic of the World’s Salvation in the Greek Fathers   65

John Anthony McGuckin

6. Maximus the Confessor and John of Damascus on the Trinity   79

Brian E. Daley, SJ

7. Deification in Augustine: Plotinian or Trinitarian?   101

Matthew Drever

8. Justification as Declaration and Deification   113

Bruce D. Marshall

Part 3. The Trinity and Ecclesial Being

9. Personhood, Communion, and the Trinity in Some Patristic Texts   147

Khaled Anatolios

10. The Trinitarian Being of the Church   165

John Behr

11. The Relevance of Gregory of Nyssa’s Ad Ablabium for Catholic-Orthodox Ecumenical Dialogue on the Trinity and the Church   183

Thomas Cattoi

12. Syriac Christian Tradition and Gender in Trinitarian Theology   199

Kathleen McVey

Conclusion: A God in Whom We Live: Ministering the Trinitarian God   217

Brian E. Daley, SJ

Abbreviations    233

List of Contributors    235

Subject Index    239

Modern Authors Index    245

Ancient Sources Index    249

Notes    255

Back Cover    265

Foreword

FATHER NICK TRIANTAFILOU

President of Holy Cross Greek Orthodox School of Theology and Hellenic College

Holy Cross Studies in Patristic Theology and History is the first publication project of the Pappas Patristic Institute of Holy Cross Greek Orthodox School of Theology in Brookline, Massachusetts. This institute, founded in 2003 with a generous gift from Stephen and Catherine Pappas, has as its goal the advancement of patristic studies in the service of the academy and of the church. It does this by supporting ecumenically sensitive and academically open research and study in the Greek patristic tradition in conversation with other ancient Christian traditions. The Institute carries forward its mission through the leadership of its board of directors composed of scholars from the Orthodox, Roman Catholic, and Protestant traditions and headed by the Rev. Dr. Robert Daly, SJ, and its director, Dr. Bruce Beck.

One of the primary ways in which the Institute works toward this goal is through a series of annual fall conferences focusing on patristic themes that have the power to shed light on contemporary concerns. Each year, in collaboration with Baker Academic, the Institute invites established scholars to contribute papers on the theme of the conference. In order to disseminate to a broad readership the insights achieved by scholars participating in these conferences, the Institute invited Baker Academic, in cooperation with Holy Cross Orthodox Press, to publish the fruits of these annual conferences in a series of attractive volumes.

A prominent characteristic of the Orthodox tradition is its understanding that patristic theology is integral to all of Christian thought and life. It is our hope that the volumes published in this series will effectively mediate the rich legacy of the early church to our contemporary world—including Christians of all traditions—which is thirsting and hungering for such food.

Preface

The self-proclaimed renaissance of trinitarian theology has been going on for some time now, and we are arguably past the point of reveling in its mere promise and at a juncture where we can ask for an account of its tangible results. Unfortunately, it is by no means self-evident that these results amount to a resounding success. This hesitation is all the more warranted if we decline to regard as the only criterion of success the circulation of certain trinitarian concepts, such as the primacy of relationality, among the guild of academic theologians and if we insist, rather, as Rahner put it in one of the pioneering texts calling for this renewal, that such success depends also on understand[ing] and present[ing] the doctrine of the Trinity in such a way that it may become a reality in the concrete life of the faithful.¹ To what extent is trinitarian doctrine today a vital reality in the concrete life of the faithful?

Behind this question, now as much as when Rahner raised the issue, lurks the unsettling perception of a disproportion between the primacy and centrality of trinitarian doctrine, on the one hand, and its seemingly vague and dim presence in the consciousness of ordinary Christians, on the other. Of course, theologians can protest that they are not wholly responsible for the wide dissemination of their insights among the faithful. It is enough that they have sowed the seeds of elucidating the significance of trinitarian doctrine; it is for other laborers in the field to nurture these seeds to germination and fruition among the Christian laity. The partial justness of that rejoinder can be readily conceded, and yet it is still advisable to consider whether the prevailing strategies of approaching trinitarian theology, even within its modern renewal, are somehow deficient, and indeed whether the whole lost and found narrative that is often implied in the self-proclamation of this renewal is somehow distorted. As to the latter, Bruce Marshall has astutely shown that it is highly problematic to presume that the most essential foundation of Christian faith has been simply missing from the practice of that faith for many centuries and needs to be reinserted by modern renovations of trinitarian theology. Marshall argues:

But the idea that such a profound deformation of Christianity has occurred at all seems implausible. . . . If this doctrine really is the most essential Christian teaching, and articulates the most basic Christian beliefs about who God is, how could Christians be generally ignorant of it or indifferent to it? If there actually are communities whose identity turns on [trinitarian faith], then their members must generally know how to be trinitarian in their identification of God and their everyday religious life, even if they lack much explicit knowledge about the doctrine of the Trinity. Of course it is almost always worthwhile to try to make implicit knowledge more explicit, not least to head off possible distortions of communal belief and practice. But this should not be confused with restoring trinitarian conviction to the church, as though it were not even implicit, and to be put there by theologians.²

Marshall’s distinction between "explicit knowledge about trinitarian doctrine and the way that that doctrine operates in Christian life helps not only to resolve the conundrum posed by the lost and found narrative of trinitarian renewal but also to point the way to just how this renewal may bear the kind of tangible fruit that Rahner desired. The fundamental task for the renewal of trinitarian theology must be not to divine a hitherto unknown insight into the mystery of trinitarian being, but rather to draw attention to the ways in which that mystery is signified through all the aspects of Christian faith and practice. As the biblical Jacob woke from his vision of a ladder to heaven with the angels of God ascending and descending on it and declared, Surely the LORD is in this place—and I did not know it! (Gen. 28:16 NRSV), so must the renewal of trinitarian theology provide the resources to enable ordinary Christians to see how the inner contents of Christian faith and its outward vision of all reality are entirely permeated by the self-manifestation of the trinitarian God: Surely the Trinity is in all this place, and I did not know it."

In my Retrieving Nicaea, I argued that the development of the formulation of trinitarian doctrine itself was constituted by a comprehensive interpretation of all aspects of Christian faith and practice as signifying the presence and activity of Father, Son, and Spirit, each fully God, together one God.³ Correspondingly, it has been one of the fundamental tenets of the modern renewal of trinitarian theology that trinitarian doctrine must inform the entirety of Christian faith. It was Karl Rahner again who complained of the isolation of Trinitarian doctrine in piety and textbook theology,⁴ yet it is hard to escape the conclusion that this isolation persisted in Rahner’s own work and still significantly characterizes too many of our modern treatments of trinitarian theology. This judgment should not be distorted into an assertion that modern theology utterly fails to draw connections between trinitarian doctrine and Christian faith and practice, as a whole, but should be recognized as indicating only an impatience that there are still not enough theological resources to provide the Christian faithful with the means of seeing how trinitarian theology is already there in all authentic Christian faith and practice—in certain ways of reading Scripture, celebrating the sacraments, understanding human nature, and so on. The renewal of trinitarian theology has not by any means been an abject failure, but perhaps the momentum that will carry it to a decisive success lies in just this direction.

The Pappas Patristic Institute, sponsored by the Holy Cross Greek Orthodox School of Theology, gathered together a number of notable scholars in 2008 for a conference entitled The Trinity in the Life of the Church. Without any further elaboration, the very title of the conference witnessed to a vision consistent with my remarks above. The conference participants were to speak not simply of the Trinity as such but of the manifestation of the Trinity in the concrete life of the church. This volume consists of the essays originally presented at that conference, supplemented with some others that I, as editor, in consultation with the Pappas Patristic Institute and Baker Academic, deemed to be constructive to the fuller development of the theme of the conference. The collection does not purport to bring the renewal of trinitarian doctrine to its complete fulfillment, but our hope is that it provides some resources for an increased attentiveness to the pervasively trinitarian matrix of Christian faith and practice.

In his contribution, John Behr warns us of the distorting effect of the modern tendency to separate the integral mystery of the Christian economy into isolated compartments. This caution being heeded, it remains possible and indeed unavoidable to contemplate the one mystery as refracted from different perspectives. In this volume, it just so happened that a threefold framework suggested itself as a useful way to organize the essays it comprises (I leave it to the reader to judge whether this framework suggests a valid trinitarian vestigium): the Trinity in Christian Worship; Jesus Christ, the Trinity, and Christian Salvation; and the Trinity and Ecclesial Being.

In part 1, our initiatory essay is Joseph Lienhard’s The Baptismal Command (Matthew 28:19–20) and the Doctrine of the Trinity. As an exemplary illustration of how the church’s trinitarian doctrine developed out of and as interpretation of the sacramental life of the church, Lienhard identifies some key points along the path whereby the baptismal rite gave rise to the church’s trinitarian creed. He demonstrates how the retreading of this path impresses upon us the necessary unity of Scripture, liturgy, doctrine, and theology, which is indispensable for an authentic appropriation of trinitarian doctrine as it is for an appropriation of Christian faith in general.

Robert Daly’s Eucharist and Trinity in the Liturgies of the Early Church also traces the dialectic of the church’s rule of prayer (lex orandi) and rule of faith (lex credendi), this time from the perspective of the manifestation of trinitarian faith in the early church’s celebration of the Eucharist. Daly shows how the eucharistic prayers of the early church gradually developed, reaching maturity in the fourth and fifth centuries. In the fourth century, we find eucharistic prayers expressing both Nicene and anti-Nicene theologies, despite common ground on the understanding of the transforming presence of Christ in the Eucharist. As Lienhard’s essay provides resources for an increased attentiveness to the trinitarian structure and meaning of baptism, so Daly’s article helps us to see the Eucharist as a privileged disclosure of the trinitarian mystery.

The theme of the role of worship in trinitarian faith is continued by Paul Hartog’s "The Nascent ‘Trinitarian’ Worship of Martyrdom of Polycarp 14 and Ephesians 1." Hartog analyzes the trinitarian form of the hagiographical material that purports to be the martyr Polycarp’s final dying prayer, and he finds that the text reflects early liturgical material. He identifies Ephesians 1:3–14 as a background to the trinitarian form of thanksgiving and praise in this prayer and thus places it within a trajectory that runs from the New Testament to the standardized trinitarian doxologies of the fourth century.

Nonna Harrison concludes this section with her essay, Gregory of Nyssa on Knowing the Trinity. Harrison’s essay presupposes that the church’s prayer already identifies each of the divine persons distinctly and glorifies them together as one God. Her concern is not with the sources and developments of the church’s trinitarian prayer, as are the essays that precede hers. Rather, she looks to Gregory of Nyssa for a theological exposition that can support the church’s practice of trinitarian prayers. She finds this support in Nyssen’s account of how the structure of origination of the trinitarian persons—the Father as source, the Son begotten immediately from the Father, the Spirit proceeding from the Father through the mediation of the Son—is manifest in all the divine activity toward creation. Nyssen’s theology of trinitarian self-disclosure can help us to be attentive to the glorious mystery of God’s trinitarian being that is disclosed through his creative and salvific beneficence toward us.

Part 2, which focuses on the disclosure of the Trinity in Jesus Christ and his salvific work, is inaugurated by John McGuckin’s The Holy Trinity as the Dynamic of the World’s Salvation in the Greek Fathers, which also provides a bridge between this section and our opening contemplation of the Trinity in the church’s worship. McGuckin insists emphatically that the proper matrix for trinitarian doctrine is doxological; the ultimate warrant of a doctrinal approach is its demonstrable consistency with the church’s liturgy. The church’s worship is permeated by the power of the trinitarian name, which refers not only to the unfathomable and ineffable glory of divine being but also to the perfect articulation of that glory in the crucified and risen Jesus. McGuckin encourages us to reencounter patristic trinitarian theology from this vital liturgical and existential perspective, which was the ambience of patristic theology itself.

The fruits of heeding such an exhortation are in full evidence in the succeeding essay, Brian Daley’s Maximus the Confessor and John of Damascus on the Trinity. Transcending the common recognition of how the nature-person language of trinitarian doctrine was foundational for the development of christological doctrine, Daley shows how, in turn, christological doctrine and language were employed to contemplate the trinitarian mystery. He presents two of the great synthesizers of patristic theology, Maximus the Confessor and John of Damascus, as exemplars of this approach. Daley’s first concern is with how both Maximus and the Damascene considered trinitarian contemplation as the summit of liturgical and mystical experience. Within this contemplation, the christological mystery of the divine-human unity without confusion and of the divine-human distinction without separation finds its ultimate foundation in the unity within distinction of the trinitarian persons. Daley also analyzes the interplay of christological and trinitarian language and concepts in Maximus’s understanding of deification and the Damascene’s conception of trinitarian mutual indwelling (perichōrēsis). The existential and practical application of this interplay of trinitarian and christological doctrine is ultimately the conviction that the way to the Trinity is Christ: conformity to Christ’s way of love enables us to be enfolded in the Spirit-filled community of the church as sons and daughters of the Father.

The way to the Trinity through Christ is also the subject of Matthew Drever’s Deification in Augustine: Plotinian or Trinitarian? In this essay, Drever joins the growing chorus of scholars who have recently rushed to the defense of Augustine against accusations that he represents a Western essentialist and solipsistic trinitarian doctrine that is incompatible with an Eastern personalist and existential approach. Drever analyzes Augustine’s presentation of the human ascent to God as substantively amounting to a doctrine of deification. Moreover, our path to God does not come about through introverted contemplation, as in the Plotinian tradition, but rather through our assimilation to Christ’s humility and through sacramental participation in Christ’s body, the church, whose unity is effected by the Spirit.

Patristic trinitarian theology was closely bound with a soteriological doctrine of deification. In Athanasius and the Cappadocians, we often encounter the argument that Christ and the Spirit must be fully divine because they divinize human beings and only true and unmitigated divinity can divinize. But the subsequent reception of the doctrine of deification was considerably complicated, especially in the Protestant traditions, by later disagreements about grace and justification. In view of this consideration, the patristic studies presented at the original conference that gave rise to this book are here supplemented by a magisterial article by Bruce Marshall, Justification as Declaration and Deification. In this article, Marshall wrestles with the seeming contradiction in Luther’s work between the conception of justification as a deifying personal union with Christ that transforms the believer such that she becomes one person with Christ and the equally emphatic understanding of justification as a forensic declaration whereby we are merely reckoned righteous through God’s overlooking our sinfulness. Marshall concludes that the resolution to this conundrum can be found only in a properly trinitarian conception of salvation and justification. We are reckoned righteous not merely by God’s turning a blind eye, as it were, to our sins and pretending that we are righteous when we are not really so, but rather because the Father loves us and judges us entirely within his love for his only begotten Son and his judgment on the Son’s salvific work on our behalf. Christ’s identification with our condition also wins for us the reception of the Spirit, which frees us from the law and the wrath of God. Marshall originally wrote this piece as a Lutheran and has since joined the Catholic Church. As a Catholic, he is still convinced that the integration of forensic and transformational elements must follow this trinitarian pattern, even if he now concedes that this integration was not fully realized by Luther himself. Regardless of adjustments to his estimation of Luther’s success in realizing this integration, Marshall’s essay stands as a profound meditation on the trinitarian content of salvation and deification.

Part 3 of this volume turns to the subject of the church’s imaging of and participation in the life of the divine Trinity. Fundamental to this theme is the question of the analogical correspondence between human and divine personhood and communion. In the introductory essay of this section, Personhood, Communion, and the Trinity in Some Patristic Texts, I acknowledge the truism that notions of personhood and communion in patristic theology have a different content than is signified by modern conceptions of these terms, but I argue against a facile extension of this truism to the blanket assertion that there is simply no continuity between modern and patristic versions of these conceptions. There are patristic resources for contemplating the divine persons as intentional, active, speaking agents who enjoy relationships of mutual delight and glorification. Such a contemplation can ground and motivate the human vocation to participate in the trinitarian life of God, a vocation fulfilled in the church.

John Behr’s essay, The Trinitarian Being of the Church, takes issue with a conception of the church as trinitarian image in which the church and the divine Trinity remain juxtaposed as parallel realities, as if the church is called to merely imitate trinitarian being. Rather, scriptural images of the church as the people of God, the body of Christ, and the temple of the Spirit should lead us to see the proper being of the church as located within the trinitarian relations. The church is called into being by the Father as the body of Christ animated by the Spirit; conversely, the church is enabled by its incorporation into Christ and its anointing by the Spirit to call upon God as Abba, in thanksgiving and praise. Behr also draws our attention to the necessity of distinguishing between the eschatological fulfillment of the church’s calling to the fullness of trinitarian indwelling and the church’s historical pilgrimage. This distinction should lead even those who profess to constitute the true church from overreaching toward the claim that they are also thereby the perfect church.

Thomas Cattoi furthers the reflection of the trinitarian being of the church in his essay, "The Relevance of Gregory of Nyssa’s Ad Ablabium for Catholic-Orthodox Ecumenical Dialogue on the Trinity and the Church. In 2007, the Joint International Commission for the Theological Dialogue between the Roman Catholic and the Orthodox Church produced a document entitled Ecclesiological and Canonical Consequences of the Sacramental Life of the Church: Ecclesial Communion, Conciliarity, and Authority, often cited as the Ravenna Document. Cattoi notes that this document likens the ideal relation between the different local churches, manifesting a unity without inequality, to the communion of persons within the divine Trinity, in which there is no subordination. Expressing a critique from a Roman Catholic perspective, he finds the document lacking in a theological rationale for the primacy of the Roman Church and endeavors to find this rationale in Gregory of Nyssa’s conception of the Father as the source of the other two divine persons. Within this trinitarian framework, the Roman Church would be considered as ontologically equal to the other churches but also as the foundation of inner ecclesial order and invested with authority over all other ecclesial communities." Of the various rejoinders to this proposal that can be anticipated, one is whether such a model would correspond too much to Behr’s evocation of the conception of the church extrinsically mimicking trinitarian being (If a certain church holds the place of the Father, is there another church or group of churches that holds the place of Christ and that of the Spirit, respectively?), while departing from the reality of the church’s participation in trinitarian life precisely as the body of Christ who calls to the Father in the Spirit. Be that as it may, surely the way forward must be to keep the dialogue on the true nature of the church anchored in the contemplation of the trinitarian life that indwells the church, as both Behr and Cattoi aspire to do.

The final essay of this section, Kathleen McVey’s Syriac Christian Tradition and Gender in Trinitarian Theology, deals with the troubling fact that the trinitarian name, which is the warp and woof of the church’s liturgical life, brings discomfort to many Christians, who interpret it as signifying the maleness of God and the ontological inferiority of human females. McVey recommends Ephrem the Syrian as a valuable resource for responding to this modern problem. Ephrem asserted both the utter transcendence of God and God’s benevolent willingness to be clothed with human speech. He distinguished the exact names of God, which include Father, and the borrowed names by which the plenitude of the riches of divine being can be appropriately imaged through creaturely likenesses. Among the latter, Ephrem applied maternal imagery to God, speaking of God as a nursing mother and of Christ as the Living Breast at which all of creation is suckled. McVey recommends following Ephrem’s example by a greater use of female imagery in speaking of God, coupled with an awareness of the limits of applying creaturely categories and language to refer to God’s transcendent being.

To conclude this volume, Brian Daley’s A God in Whom We Live: Ministering the Trinitarian God contrasts the modern reluctance to speak of the mystery of the Trinity, painfully evident in the studied evasions of many a preacher on Trinity Sunday, with the trinitarian fluency of the patristic proclamation and contemplation of the church’s faith. What enabled this patristic fluency was an integral focus not reducible to the devising of logical categories to describe divine being but rather centered on the Trinity as the place in which all of Christian life happens. This is not to say that the trinitarian God has no self-sustaining objective reality, but rather that we have doxological access to this reality precisely through our sharing in it: the Trinity in whom we live. It is to be hoped that the contents of this volume will contribute to the church’s ongoing quest to be doxologically attentive to the trinitarian life that grounds and animates its being.

Khaled Anatolios

Part

1

The

Trinity

in Christian

Worship

1

The Baptismal Command (Matthew 28:19–20) and the Doctrine of the Trinity

JOSEPH T. LIENHARD, SJ

When I first read Gregory of Nyssa’s Great Catechetical Oration, or, as it is sometimes called, the Address on Religious Instruction, one paragraph caught my attention, and it has held it ever since. Toward the end of the treatise Gregory writes:

We are taught in the gospel that there are three Persons and Names through whom believers come to be born. He who is born of the Trinity is born equally of Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. For this is how the gospel speaks about the Spirit: That which is born of the Spirit is spirit [John 3:6]. Paul, moreover, gives birth in Christ [1 Cor. 4:15], and the Father is the Father of all [cf. Eph. 4:6]. And here I ask the reader to judge soberly, lest he make himself the offspring of an unstable nature, when he could have that which is unchangeable as the source of his life. For what happens in the sacrament of baptism depends upon the disposition of the heart of him who approaches it. If he confesses that the holy Trinity is uncreated, then he enters on the life which is unchanging. But if, on a false supposition, he sees a created nature in the Trinity and then is baptized into that, he is born once more to a life which is subject to change. For offspring and parents necessarily share the same nature. Which, then, is more advantageous: to enter upon the life which is unchanging or to be tossed about once more in a life of instability and fluctuation?¹

The words spoken at baptism are powerful words, Gregory says; they can incorporate us into the true God or into a false god, depending on what words are used and what meaning is intended. So, be careful of what God you are baptized into. Baptism is a form of paternity, and offspring share the nature of their parents. If you are baptized into an Arian or Anomoean god,² then you are the offspring of a mutable god, and you are baptized into a life that is subject to change, a life of instability and fluctuation. If you are baptized into the Trinity who is three Persons and three Names, the Three who are equal, then you enter into a life that is unchanging; so, know who your Father is before you are baptized into him.

There is far more than a rhetorical conceit here. Gregory is drawing a close connection between the words spoken at baptism and the reality of God himself. The passage raises an important topic: the relation between baptism in the Triple Name, on the one hand, and Christian faith in the Trinity and the theology of the Trinity in the early church, on the other.

The fathers of the church often used Matthew 28:19 in their doctrinal and theological argumentation. In some significant passages in their writings, they cited the baptismal command (Matt. 28:19) more or less verbatim and drew doctrinal or theological conclusions from it. The texts that meet these criteria are not numerous, but the ones that do are quite interesting. They fall roughly into three groups. The first group consists of passages relating the baptismal command to the development of the creed and, later, to the explication of the creed. The second group includes passages dealing with a specific, single word in the baptismal command and drawing a conclusion from the sense of that single word. The third group comprises passages that make more general theological points when quoting the baptismal command.

The Baptismal Command and the Creed

The baptismal command appears to be the origin of the creed, or at least the point from which baptismal creeds grew.³ But there is no consensus about the precise origin of the creeds. One reads sometimes that creeds developed when phrases and clauses were added to the Triple Name of baptism to refute heresies. There is some evidence for this claim, but not enough to reach certainty.⁴

A few highlights that trace the development of the creeds can be pointed out. The baptismal command in Matthew 28:18–20 is one of the most familiar texts in the New Testament. In the translation of the Revised Standard Version, it reads:

And Jesus came and said to them, All authority in heaven and on earth has been given to me. Go therefore and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, teaching them to observe all that I have commanded you; and lo, I am with you always, to the close of the age.

The Greek has one imperative, make disciples, and three participles parallel to that imperative, so that Jesus’s words are equivalent to four commands: go, make disciples, baptize, and teach. One of the commands is to travel, one is to administer the sacrament, and two are to teach. The roots of Christianity as a doctrinal religion and a religion that has a creed, truths that must be accepted, are in this passage.

To mention just a few highlights in the development of the teaching and practice of baptism, we might begin with the Didache. In this famous document, which probably dates from the first half of the second century, baptism is a liturgical rite that is already developed. There is an almost rubrical concern about how the sacrament should be administered. But also, the Matthean formula with the Triple Name is clearly invoked:

The procedure for baptizing is as follows. . . . Immerse in running water, In the Name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. If no running water is available, immerse in ordinary water. This should be cold if possible; otherwise warm. If neither is practicable, then pour water three times on the head In the Name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Both baptizer and baptized ought to fast before the baptism, as well as any others who can do so; but the candidate himself should be told to keep a fast for a day or two beforehand.⁵

In the Didache, the emphasis is on moral rather than doctrinal instruction; the first six chapters of this work treat the two ways: the way of life and the way of death. The Didache gives little evidence of doctrinal norms, except perhaps in regard to the Eucharist: the Eucharist may be given only to those who have been baptized.⁶

Justin Martyr, in his First Apology, mentions some points that the Didache already made. Those who accept the